Quote: "Basically, I only want to play porn
stars. I want to see if I can [go] my entire career and only play that role.
It'll be fun (joking)."

Heather Graham Biography

When she first packed her bags and hit the Sunset Strip in search of cinema's
Promised Land, the best gig actress Heather Graham could find was playing
the girl of Corey Haim's dreams in the angst-riddled yukfest License to
Drive. After spending several years as a very minor glimmer in Hollywood's
galaxy of stars, however, she proved herself far more than just another heavenly
body, with a knockout performance in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's
1997 paean to porn, Boogie Nights. As the ebullient Rollergirl, a skin-flick
starlet who willingly strips down to her treasured skates, but nary a stitch
further, Graham sported the only hardware in the movie more striking than
the 13-inch prosthetic penis brandished by co-star Mark Wahlberg. She cemented
her It-girl status with a prominent cameo in the hip slasher sequel Scream
2, and a lip-locking, tongue-tangling smooch with Friends hunk
Matt LeBlanc in the big-screen remake of Lost in Space.

Quite apart from the conclusions one might draw based on her unfettered watershed
Boogie Nights role, Graham was raised in a straitlaced, staunchly Catholic
household: her parents once encouraged their daughter to consider entering
a convent. The eldest of two children, Graham was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
and grew up in different cities across the U.S. where her father's FBI job
took the family. Among her fondest memories of childhood are the hours she
spent watching The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, and Speed
Racer; as she later explained to one interviewer, "I had a huge crush
on Speed Racer." Graham gained her first-ever acting experience playing Dorothy
in a stage production of The Wizard of Oz, and she pursued acting through
her high school years at Agoura High in Southern California. By the time she
graduated, her senior class had become sufficiently convinced of her abilities
to vote her "most talented," and her parents had begun to drive her to Los
Angeles for auditions.

Eventually, Graham decided it was time to leave the nest, and she migrated
to L.A. in order to more fully engage in the time-honored cinematic tradition
of juggling odd jobs and waiting for her big break; her most notable bread-winning
gig during this period was working as an usher at the Hollywood Bowl. Though
License to Drive, released in 1988, marked her feature-film debut,
her second movie, Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, would prove the
highlight of Graham's early career. Van Sant cast her in the film as a strung-out
teenage drifter taken in by a trio of road-tripping, shoplifting junkies,
and Graham sank her teeth into the part. Though the critics crowed and the
movie became an art-house blockbuster, Graham languished in the shadow of
co-star Matt Dillon, and the next couple of years found her working so sporadically
that she finally enrolled at UCLA and took on an English major. By her own
admission a peerless procrastinator, the would-be co-ed's interest in academia
had played itself out by the end of her sophomore year, and she dropped out
of school to fully resume acting.

Graham's career rebirth got off to a respectable start in 1990, when she
made a small appearance alongside Kevin Kline in the Lawrence Kasdan-directed
infidelity satire I Love You to Death; that same year, David Lynch
cast her in a recurring role in his seminal TV series, Twin Peaks.
Her next several movies, however, were little-seen flops, including Lynch's
critically-excoriated adaptation of his own hit television series, Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and the ill-advised period musical Shout,
which also featured a pre-comeback John Travolta and a pre-Pitt Gwyneth Paltrow.

Perhaps Graham's most intriguing performance during this period came off-camera,
when she engaged in a six-month-long May-December love affair with actor James
Woods, whom she'd met on the set of 1992's Diggstown. By one account,
Woods, who was exactly twice her age at the time, first took a shine to his
fresh-faced co-star when he spotted her thumbing through a dog-eared copy
of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a prized possession from her
days at UCLA. Exactly what made the attraction mutual even Graham ended up
at a loss to express; as she later recalled, "That was one of those relationships
you look back on and say, 'What was I doing?' He's a very interesting man,
but it's hard to imagine I dated him."

Though she rebounded somewhat with small roles in the indie hits Six Degree
of Separation (Will Smith's debut feature film) and Mrs. Parker and the
Vicious Circle, it wasn't until 1996 that Graham got her next substantial
break. Fellow Milwaukee native and buddy Jon Favreau offered her a small role
in Swingers, a breezy little comedy he'd written about the trials of
young, unemployed actors looking for love. Swingers became one of the
biggest surprise hits of 1996, and Graham, cast as the dream-girl who rescues
Favreau from a run of bum luck and failed relationships at the end of the
movie, became a hot commodity. She landed a potent one-two punch the next
year with Boogie Nights and Scream 2, and 1998's Lost in
Space continued her winning streak. She nabbed a starring role in one
of summer 1999's most wildly anticipated sequels, Austin Powers: The Spy
Who Shagged Me, and hot on its heels came Steve Martin's sharpley observed
Hollywood satire Bowfinger, in which Graham played an exceedingly opportunistic
starlet.

In her personal life, Graham recently ended a long-standing relationship
with actor Ed Burns. Though she's abandoned her Catholic roots, she regularly
practices Transcendental Meditation, and in addition to her film work, has
a modeling contract with Emanuel Ungaro.